As previously, the Washtenaw County Michigan EOC test county warning sirens monthly on the first Saturday of the month during the spring, summer, and fall months. I was home monitoring the net for this session, both via RF on the 145.15- N8DUY repeater (PL 100), as well as via the... Continue reading

The Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor, Michigan and area) siren net started at 11:30 a.m. Saturday 2020-03-07 Eastern time, and was done by about 12:15 p.m. Of the two dozen or so sirens monitored, three were in need of maintenance. The county emergency operations center runs a net on N8DUY on... Continue reading

I was net control for the 8:00 p.m. Sunday night 23 February 2020 University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club net. Here are my notes. 17 people total, and we were on until about about 8:40 p.m. * K8EV Ovid - Collins, capacitor repairs * KE7ZDY Steve - nil * WA4CJX... Continue reading

NVidia has been developing a set of GPU-accelerated software packages under the RAPIDS brand. Most of them are targeted at graphics accelerators that I don't have at home in my home menagerie of single board arm64 systems. The interesting one that is in scope is cuSignal, a signal-processing tool that... Continue reading

[sdr.hu](https://sdr.hu) is a directory of software-defined radio receivers, run by András HA7ILM the author of the OpenWebRX software that drives those receivers. There are currently just over 500 receivers online, all around the world. Recently the site has added a registration requirement, which restricts the site directory to individuals with... Continue reading

Imagine for the moment that you have a set of very large data files in CSV format. They might be log files from some process, or Census data, or other big data. Also imagine that your desktop workstation doesn't have the capacity to easily process the whole file set locally,... Continue reading

Logbook for Saturday, just a few things to note. On the theme of "big data is any data set too big to fit into Excel": Nick Strayer recounts the tale of optimizing a bioinformatics query, starting from a solution in Apache Spark that cost $2o per query with a runtime... Continue reading

Reading: Robustness in Complex Systems, Steven D. Gribble, 2001. Noted by Cindy Sridharan. " We show that although the system behaved correctly when operating within its design assumptions, small perturbations sometimes led to the violation of these assumptions, which in turn lead to systemwide failure." I am always up for... Continue reading

3/n, a short one today from the Thanksgiving holiday. I made a big recipe of kale with sweet corn as a side - blanch and drain the kale, then saute frozen corn until just browned; mix and continue to cook until the liquid is gone, season with soy sauce. Reuters... Continue reading

Day 2/n of a daily log. Huawei has a new Kunpeng Desktop Board, featuring a Kunpeng 920 arm64 processor, up to 64GB of memory, three PCIe slots (x16, x4, x1) and 2x M.2 SSD, plus lots of SATA and USB ports. The details on the processor are incomplete; the page... Continue reading

Notes from the day's log. This is day 1/n, the hope is that it's a useful output with a few days or weeks of practice. Debugging Go, the Linux Kernel, and GCC signal handling. There's an interesting and very deep set of bugs that are being explored in the Linux... Continue reading

First goal: this is not a "random bag of words" blog. It will focus on tech, specifically related to work. I have other outlets for non-work writing. Second: one post per day, sent out at the end of the workday, in "logbook" style; that is, terse, plenty of links, and... Continue reading

What, another blog? Continue reading

The night's report from the BBC at 0515 UTC is from Hong Kong, where there is political unrest. I'm listening via [KiwiSDR ZL/KF6VO Hooksiel](http://webcamapo.dynt4.de:8073/), a KiwiSDR in northern Germany. The transmitter site is at [Santa Maria di Galeria](https://www.short-wave.info/index.php?txsite=Santa%20Maria%20di%20Galeria), the home of Vatican Radio. Continue reading

Opsgenie has an interesting post up about using the Amazon stack including a transcription service to decode amateur radio traffic and send alerts. In the post entitled [Convert Radio Waves to Alerts using SDR, AWS Lambda and Amazon Transcribe](https://engineering.opsgenie.com/convert-radio-waves-to-alerts-using-sdr-aws-lambda-and-amazon-transcribe-7ba64f8eefa), Farhi Yardimci uses [ham2mon](https://github.com/ffahri/ham2mon) and a stack of AWS services to... Continue reading

A good deal of my day to day upkeep of useful things on the net is at my [Commonplace](http://emv-commonplace.netlify.com) site on Netlify. This has mostly replaced blogging as my outlet for when I think that the Internet needs some extra words or links. Some useful places have been the [baseball](https://emv-commonplace.netlify.com/baseball/)... Continue reading

First time on [MichiganONE DMR] net. Some impressions: - just because it's digital doesn't mean it's perfect - state-wide nets get a lot more people! (19) - some discussion of switch to different time [MichiganONE DMR]:https://www.michiganonedmr.net/ Thanks to Dustin N8RMA for being net control! Continue reading

[Owntracks](https://owntracks.org/) is a self-hosted system for keeping track of where you are or where things are. It comes with an IOS and Android client, and has an MQTT API to let you insert geolocation in from your favorite program. JP Mens created the idea and developed the back end server;... Continue reading

Day one on a new DMR radio. First impressions: when the sound quality is good, it's just fine. No noise, but you do get dropouts. I'm sure that's the quality of the DMR voice encoder/decoder and not specific to my radio. I have a Baofeng / Radioddity RD-5R, purchased on... Continue reading

If you are looking to understand the entire sequence of what it takes to identify that aircraft that's passing overhead, here's a list of the components I'm using at home to power a web site that I can view from anywhere to identify aircraft - or blimps - overhead. This... Continue reading

I rode and drove SAG for the AABTS "One Helluva Ride" on Saturday, July 14, 2018 with Saul KE8DDR. We clocked 111 miles door to door, which included two stops at the Gregory rest stop and a scenic ride through Hell, MI on a road that was paved with good... Continue reading

The combination of [KiwiSDR](http://kiwisdr.com/) and [sdr.hu](http://sdr.hu) plus Wikipedia's baseball radio network maps plus AM sports radio makes for excellent baseball DX. It's a little work to map out what's where, but generally you are looking for a flagship station in the baseball broadcast network on the AM band, or a... Continue reading

radiosocial.org is a Mastodon instance for radio amateurs. It's a fairly new system in 2018, but already the local timeline is well dedicated to radio interests. It's run by Andy M1LOL (@ak). Mastodon is a worldwide federated network of systems which run a social network. The user interface is reminiscent... Continue reading

Montoring notes, rather than operating notes, as I was just listening to this net. On the first Saturday of each month, the Washtenaw County sirens are tested at noon, March through October. A net on the N8DUY 145.15 repeater assists in this testing. Radio operators are encouraged to register in... Continue reading

As previously noted the W8UM repeater on 145.23 is off the air because of construction on the University of Michigan central campus at the Weiser Building (aka Dennison Building, aka Physics and Astronomy building). The complete gut and rehab of the space meant that all systems in that building are... Continue reading